A group of research libraries in the US are collaborating to create a repository of their vast digital collections, including millions of books, to be archived and preserved in a single repository called the HathiTrust. Materials in the public domain will be available for reading online. The group includes the 12-university consortium known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and the 11 university libraries of the University of California (UC) system.
UC's participation will be coordinated by the California Digital Library (CDL), which expects to bring its experience in digital curation and online scholarship to the HathiTrust. The repository contains more than 2 million volumes and around three-fourth of a billion pages, about 16 percent of which are in the public domain. Public domain materials will be available for reading online. Materials protected by copyright, although not available for reading online, are given the full range of digital archiving services, thereby offering member libraries a reliable means to preserve their collections. Organisers also expect to use those materials in the research and development of the Trust.
Volumes are added to the repository daily, and content will grow rapidly as the UC, CIC member libraries and other prospective partners contribute their digitised content. The University of Virginia is the latest to join the initiative.
Creation of the HathiTrust is seen to support the digitisation efforts of the CIC and the UC, each of which has entered into collective agreements with Google. The alliance with Google is to digitise portions of the collections of their libraries, more than 10 million volumes in total, as part of the Google Book Search project. Materials digitised through other means will also be made available through HathiTrust.
